Page 67 of Tear Me Apart

“Back up a second. You’re reopening the case?”

“Not exactly. I’m going to do some legwork and see if anything pops. If it does, then we’ll reopen the case. Fair enough?”

“Yes. Quite fair.”

“Good. Now. Can you run me through the whole story? I’d like to hear everything, start to finish.”

“The file—”

She smiles. Her teeth are pretty. The smile makes her look sweet and innocent, and he knows she isn’t. Not by a long shot. Not after what she’s seen.

“Files are what they are. I’d like to hear your point of view, verbally, instead of reading and watching the old tapes.”

“Looking for inconsistencies in my answers and body language?”

“Of course. But it’s better for me to understand the case from your perspective. Helps keep me from making assumptions. I know it’s been a long time, but I bet you have a lot of insight to share.”

She is a cool customer, he’ll give her that. He looks at Parks, who nods encouragingly.

“Unfortunately, there’s not much to tell. I was in lower Alabama. My mom was dying—late-stage breast cancer. Vivian wasn’t due for a couple of weeks. Even though I wanted to stay close to home, she encouraged me to go down, be with my mom. She was adamant. So I went and had a chance to say goodbye, and we buried my mom the same day Vivian was murdered.”

He recites these facts with as little emotion as possible, though inside his gut is churning. He wasn’t expecting to reopen all his wounds this afternoon.

“And you were injured in the line of duty, yes? That’s why you were home in the first place?”

“I had a meet go sideways, and was shot. They sent me home to recover. I jumped at the chance to get back stateside before the baby was born.”

“According to your statement, your wife didn’t call you when she went into premature labor, nor after she had the baby. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. She wanted a home birth, was working with University Hospital’s midwife program. They delivered Violet at home with no issue, left her there with a planned follow-up OB appointment that she didn’t show for.

“Trust me when I say I regret not getting in the car and driving home immediately when I couldn’t reach her, but I had my hands full with my mom. It wasn’t unusual for my wife not to answer. When I was overseas, I caught her only about half the time. After several missed calls, though, I finally got scared and headed home. And as we all know, after she had the baby, someone broke in and stabbed her twice, once in the stomach, once in the neck. The baby was taken. Whoever did it wore gloves, there were no fingerprints or outside DNA found, other than the midwife, who was cleared right away. And me, of course.”

“You found her.”

“I did. The following day. She’d been dead for a while.” He looks off into the distance, out the windows, over the city. The dog sets her head on his knee. He pets her ears absently.

“I’ve seen the photos. It was bad,” Starr says, not unsympathetically.

Bad. The understatement of the century. “Yes, it was.”

“Do you have any ideas who could be responsible?”

“No. There was a thought that I got too close to discovering something in an operation, and they needed to warn me off.”

“So the suspect or suspects were sending a message. But you left the Army after this incident?”

“I did. I resigned my commission and went back to school. Finished my Ph.D., landed a tenure-track position at Vanderbilt. I got lucky. They don’t hand them out like jelly beans.” He didn’t need to add—and with some people thinking I was a murderer...

“You teach English, is that right?”

“Right. English Lit, creative writing, comp, the works.”

“So how was your relationship with your wife?”

Zack gives her a look. “It was good, outside of the fact that I only saw her once or twice a year while I was deployed. We kept up by phone and email, some online chats when we could. It wasn’t as easy as it is now. I was off the grid for a large part of my deployment.”

“What did you do in the Army? I mean, counterintelligence is rather vague.”